For example, say you want to purchase a pair of shoes online from Nordstrom. You would have to browse their site and look around until you find the pair you wanted. Then you would add the pair to your cart to go through the motions of checking out. But in the case Nordstrom had a conversational bot, you would simply tell the bot what you’re looking for and get an instant answer. You would be able to search within an interface that actually learns what you like, even when you can’t coherently articulate it. And in the not-so-distant future, we’ll even have similar experiences when we visit the retail stores.
With the AI future closer to becoming a reality, companies need to begin preparing to join that reality—or risk getting left behind. Bots are a small, manageable first step toward becoming an intelligent enterprise that can make better decisions more quickly, operate more efficiently, and create the experiences that keep customers and employees engaged.

Conversational bots can help a business’s customers with difficult transactions, plus collect data and give recommendations. For example, a conversational bot integrated to an airline’s website can answer questions regarding flight availability, rebook tickets, fees and suggest add-ons like hotels. Though a conversational bot may not be able to finish the exchanges, it could still be able to gather preliminary data and pass it on to the next available customer care agent. In both cases, the airline will save considerable time in its call center.

It's fair to say that I'm pretty obsessed with chatbots right now. There are some great applications popping up from brands that genuinely add value to the end consumer, and early signs are showing that consumers are actually responding really well to them. For those of you who aren't quite sure what I'm talking about, here's a quick overview of what a chatbot is:
In the early 90’s, the Turing test, which allows determining the possibility of thinking by computers, was developed. It consists in the following. A person talks to both the person and the computer. The goal is to find out who his interlocutor is — a person or a machine. This test is carried out in our days and many conversational programs have coped with it successfully.
However, as irresistible as this story was to news outlets, Facebook’s engineers didn’t pull the plug on the experiment out of fear the bots were somehow secretly colluding to usurp their meatbag overlords and usher in a new age of machine dominance. They ended the experiment due to the fact that, once the bots had deviated far enough from acceptable English language parameters, the data gleaned by the conversational aspects of the test was of limited value.
It takes bold visionaries and risk-takers to build future technologies into realities. In the field of chatbots, there are many companies across the globe working on this mission. Our mega list of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and chatbot companies, covers the top companies and startups who are innovating in this space.
Oftentimes, brands have a passive approach to customer interactions. They only communicate with their audience once a consumer has contacted them first. A chatbot automatically sends a welcome notification when a person arrives on your website or social media profile making the user aware of your chatbots presence. This makes you seem more proactive, thus enhancing your brand's reputation and can even increase interactions, having a positive effect on your sales numbers, too.
Previous generations of chatbots were present on company websites, e.g. Ask Jenn from Alaska Airlines which debuted in 2008[27] or Expedia's virtual customer service agent which launched in 2011.[27][28] The newer generation of chatbots includes IBM Watson-powered "Rocky", introduced in February 2017 by the New York City-based e-commerce company Rare Carat to provide information to prospective diamond buyers.[29][30]